Britain Issues First Online Safety Fine To US Website 4chan (reuters.com) 127
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Britain said on Monday it had issued U.S. internet forum site 4chan with a $26,644 fine for failing to provide information about the risk of illegal content on its service, marking the first penalty under the new online safety regime. Media regulator Ofcom said 4chan had not responded to its request for a copy of its illegal harms risk assessment nor a second request relating to its qualifying worldwide. Ofcom said it would take action against any service which "flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act" and they should expect to face penalties.
The act, which is designed to protect children and vulnerable users from illegal content online, has caused tension between U.S. tech companies and Britain. Critics of the law have said it threatens free speech and targets U.S. companies. Technology minister Liz Kendall said the government "fully backed" Ofcom in taking action. "This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material," she said. 4chan and Kiwi Farms filed a lawsuit in the United States against Ofcom in August, arguing that the threats and fines issued by the regulator "constitute foreign judgements that would restrict speech under U.S. law." The lawsuit claims that both entities are entirely based in the U.S., have no operations in the U.K., and therefore are not subject to its local laws.
The act, which is designed to protect children and vulnerable users from illegal content online, has caused tension between U.S. tech companies and Britain. Critics of the law have said it threatens free speech and targets U.S. companies. Technology minister Liz Kendall said the government "fully backed" Ofcom in taking action. "This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material," she said. 4chan and Kiwi Farms filed a lawsuit in the United States against Ofcom in August, arguing that the threats and fines issued by the regulator "constitute foreign judgements that would restrict speech under U.S. law." The lawsuit claims that both entities are entirely based in the U.S., have no operations in the U.K., and therefore are not subject to its local laws.
4Chan is Garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
4Chan is a terrible site, that sucks so badly it regresses all of humanity with its very existence ... but it's also the perfect poster child for "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
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If only people today cared about that sentiment in America... They claimed to want it, but there's lack of follow-through now.
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Maybe so, but judging by some of the things that will get you banned from 4chan, 4chan doesn't really care about free speech either. They seem to mostly just care about protecting their own staff and little clique of insiders' ability to be abusive.
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Kiwi farms on the other hand (Score:2, Insightful)
If you have ever used the bsnes emulator the author of it killed herself and kiwi farms was involved.
Not that the UK law would help any of that. Someone was successful in taking kiwi farms off the internet for a Time by going aro
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Plenty of hate groups flourish on discord servers and whatsapp groups, with far easier ability to conduct and control raids real time than you ever had on a 4chan thread.
You're a naive fool to think that taking one website down will stop whatever part of the human condition it is that seeks these behaviour out. Until all the pipes are blocked and the cats are dead, there will always be another ocean to piss in.
It's easy to shut those down (Score:1)
Centralization can bring a lot of power to evil. It's why dictators exist.
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You report them and away they go. Yeah they will crop up again but they don't get as big as kiwi farms.
Report them to whom? Their ISP? They have several. The time you're talking about that they went "down" was measured in hours, and it was only after they were dropped by cloudflare, which itself was under dubious reasoning. The longest outage they ever had was due to a database failure, which is a bit tricky because it's a distributed database that they self-manage, i.e. no MSP to do it for them.
Kiwi farms centralized the practice of online harassment
They did exactly the opposite. The whole reason they're able to stay up at all is because they've built a highly d
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You're a naive fool
Nothing naïve or foolish here at all. This is well informed intention. The intention leads to GULAGs for the likes of you, and your wrong-thinking ways. That's what rsilvergun and all its ilk dream of and strive for, as we see in the UK.
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I guess you haven't viewed the many threads on /p featuring hundreds of images of 1950s and older airplanes, or exotic sports cars, or tropical flowers.
I imagine that the Sears catalogue at your house always fell open to the women's underwear pages, and not the bicyles and slot cars.
Re:Kiwi farms on the other hand (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the old Nazi bar problem. Once you start letting a few Nazis in congratulations your bar is a Nazi bar.
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That's true.
Like when you let in the first feminist: Poof! All fhe fun is gone! ;)
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A Nazi bar issue exists only on woke social media.
It is utterly detached from reality
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A Nazi bar issue exists only on woke social media.
Are you claiming that this anecdote is false [wiktionary.org]? That's libel, do you have any evidence?
Nazis protecting Nazis (Score:2)
Point out some Nazi shit and get modded down.
B!zX puts Re!ch in the word filter, and also has put Nazi in there multiple times, to try to prevent people from talking about Nazis
Slashdot must be run by Nazis.
Dude it's 2025 (Score:1)
You know how you used to call it bleeding hearts but then it became political correct and then it became cancel culture and then it was woke? You guys tried dei but I think that was a little to iso complicated for the sort of person you're trying to appeal to.
I'm just saying that your material is getting stale and just like how cracker barrel had to change their logo you need to come up with some new branding for a new generation of keyboard warr
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You would have had a better response using child porn as the worry. Apparently, Nazis and absolute authority are all the rage again, so in essence, you are arguing against your own point with the Nazi example. Protect the children ALWAYS works.
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Section 230 stops them having to pro-actively moderate posts before they go live, but I don't think it means they are completely absolved of responsibility for removing material that is illegal in the US or wherever they are hosted these days.
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Kiwifarms seems just to be what 4chan was before it was bought. There is a reason they called 4chan the "internet hate machine" and today it is tame and kiwifarms is the hate machine. If you look at kiwifarms they also don't seem to target the trans community in particular, they target everyone. It's only that transsexual persons are some of their targets and report about it without reporting or thinking about the other targets.
The whole lgbtq community also seems not to understand "don't feed the trolls".
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Why? The clear message over the last few months is Americans clearly don't want to defend speech they disagree with. They claim it's dangerous to society and then arrest people for saying it.
The mere fact is...the vast majority of Americans actually saw what went on; they'd forget about the first and demand it get shut down.
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These sites just perpetuate hate and KF actually posts things knowing it will get their targets killed if the right psychopath goes looking for victims.
Re: 4Chan is Garbage (Score:3)
The worst thing is that 4chan vents what's going on in the head of some people, but they would just find other channels.
What 4chan also can be is more than what's obvious - a waterhole that can be used to attract people that the governments wants to track, just watch for political trends there.
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4chan is a social bubble like any other. It normalizes behaviour that wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else.
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But the people would be there and meet in another bubble. Such groups form because the people exist and not vice versa. GP told that you can let them meet in a bubble you are able to observe. Feds know 4chan, but they might not know the secret Discord groups where other dangerous people meet. Take away 4chan and who knows where the next 4chan breeds and how easy or not it is to infiltrate.
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Haven't been there in decades, but you seem to be a daily visitor and an expert.
What about other sites / software repos? (Score:3)
Using 4chan as an example is attempting to pick the low hanging fruit that most people will agree with blocking. They can be certain they'll find *something* pretty bad there. But this is also having a chilling effect in a lot of other places.
This is the git repo site used by Alpine (the modern fork of UW's Pine email software), and their notice to UK users:
https://repo.or.cz/uk-blocked.... [repo.or.cz]
This repo decided to block the UK preemptively because they don't have the means to comply with the requested audit. He
The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Funny)
I'd love to see how fining companies with only virtual presence in the UK works out.
Not a lawyer, but UK law doesn't apply across the world.
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The first thing that comes to mind is they could place the owners / operators of the website on a secret watch list for detention if they ever happen to step foot inside jurisdiction. And this could affect them for years to come. Have friends or family in the UK? You're not going to be going on vacation to visit them. Great job offer from over there? nope. Does this apply to your spouse too? How about your kids? ALL the employees of your company? They're already being unreasonable, what makes you t
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Being a UK citizen, at the moment.
Yes, they probably would be arrested if they ever went to the UK.
They would not arrest people not at the very top of the company.
But yes, that can change,
The UK government already has the power to tell ISPs to block IP certain addresses, and for ISPs to add any addresses they may use to get around the ban.
This law is probably part one in a plan to go VPNs
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Other countries have applied various opportunistic squeezes of that kind to exert control over Internet businesses that are outside their jurisdiction. One example was Brazil forcing X to delete the accounts of its current president's political opponents by threatening the Brazilian presences of SpaceX and Tesla, unrelated Musk-owned businesses. I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I like that he whacked Brazil with punitive tariffs for taking this action. The message sent is that any tinhorn who uses suc
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
People who want to access it will use a VPN and eventually the people who passed these laws will use that to get vpns criminalized.
You need to pay close attention to who is pushing these laws. I promise you every time you look you are going to find a right winger.
The left wing is too busy trying to stop fascism and maintain human civilization to be bothered with bullshit like this. You might find the occasional centrist that gets roped into it too. Centrists can be frustrating because they will basically do whatever the fuck they think the voters want even if the voters want something incredibly stupid.
Here in America we had a anti-crime bill in the 90s specifically written to Target black people that was extremely popular with the black community because they wanted a crackdown on the crime in their neighborhoods that the police were ignoring because, well black neighborhoods.
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen politicians try to ban VPNs before
It's very funny watching them try to work out ways to do it that don't criminalise banking software, business operations and their own secure channels. The best they can do is tack a 'for criminal purposes' on the end, which is redundant in any jurisdiction that already has wire or carrier based laws.
America isn't very good at very much (Score:3)
We're not perfect. Every now and then a pretty white woman will get caught up in our laws attacking women's reproductive healthcare for example. And sometimes the cops will harass someone that is clearly not of the appropriate economic class for harassment.
But for the most part we are very good at building systems that punish the innocent and reward the evil. I mean we had slavery longer than anyone on the planet and segregation and Jim Cr
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I mean yeah... you can also legislate that pi equals 3 if you want. We had a parliament a few years back that thought they had a legal framework for 'banning encryption'. Physics and tech aren't actually undermined by authority, no matter how hard they stamp their feet... and sometimes in the process they spend a long time explaining how they just don't understand even concepts associated with planning around stuff they rely on. No amount of public opinion will ever override that, no matter how many times t
The reason you legislate pi equal 3 (Score:1)
Fascism requires an in group which the law protects but does not bind and an out group that the law binds but does not protect.
That's what you're looking at these days. Good old-fashioned fascism.
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in reality, in the situation where this actually happened (in Indiana, in 1897)... the motivation appears to have been a pure narcissistic push by a man named Edwin Goodwin to go down in history as "the man who squared the circle", in defiance of the existing mathematical proofs that said this method of determining pi was not possible. He relied heavily on rhetoric and the limited logical understanding of the legislature, conflating the math that showed it was not possible to do what he was trying with the
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It's very funny watching them try to work out ways to do it that don't criminalise banking software, business operations and their own secure channels.
It's worked pretty damn well in China. Just saying, it is possible if you try hard enough.
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It's worked pretty damn well in China. Just saying, it is possible if you try hard enough.
Yeah, they're doing so well that you can read comparisons of VPNs which work in China [thebestvpn.com].
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Surely it must be possible to write a law in a way that bans the likes of NordVPN without banning the VPN I use to phone home from outside, or connect to my work's internal network?
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Well... lets think about it. What would that take? How would you write it?
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Correct that "oh we must protect the children" is the thin end of the wedge to total Internet censorship, and VPN bans are not far off. But don't forget that left wing is the original control economy and invetor of the Cheka. Our Labour government is pushing this, and mandatory ID cards, to expand state control into every corner of private life.
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Horseshoe theory (Score:1)
And right wing doesn't mean opposed to government again like we are typically taught.
Right wing means deference to a hierarchy. It comes from the monarchists back in the day who sat on the right wing.
Left wing doesn't necessarily mean the opposite though. What left-wing means is advocating a society where everyone has necessities, a little bit more than the necessities at least and more if society is able an
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but it does apply in the UK, and international law has always been clear that when you serve customers in a country, you do so under the laws of that country.
UK law does not apply to what is served to US customers. It applies to what is served to UK customers. And if you break UK laws, you pay UK penalties.
This has been the standard internationally since Dow Jones vs Gutnick 23 years ago (That was an australian lawsuit that settled how international juristiction works in defamation cases and has been largely adopted internationally as it was based on the US model of international juristiction).
Note also, both OFCOM thing, and Twitters violations in Australia are both related to websites (4chan and twitter) refusing to provide information to cops doing child porn investigations.
Thats what these companies are protecting. Nothing to do with politics. Its pedophiles, not politicians.
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In the Dow Jones case, did they have any business dealings in Australia? Or was the threat to use international law to make them pay the judgement against them?
Because it seems that the only way Ofcom can make 4chan pay is by trying to get their judgement enforced in the US, which seems extremely unlikely given both US law and the current administration.
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You can absolutely get a local court judgement that a fine is payable - and is 'just and legal' in your country. And if the OP ever transits through your country you may even be able to enforce it.
That's likely what will happen here. OFCOM will fine the owners of 4chan in the UK, and if they ever travel through the UK or store funds here, they may well have to pay that fine.
4chan takes UK ad money (Score:2)
And that is straightforward to impound. You cannot claim legal immunity from a foreign country and at the same time earn money from that country.
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Just another act of an ongoing shitshow. This is a government that is obsessed with 'optics', i.e. their popularity. They're now massively unpopular in UK, mostly, I believe, because people expected them to implement substantial policies, especially after a massive victory in the elections. They've been too afraid to do anything, however, for fear of upsetting anyone, and ironically this pissed off more or less everybody. This is just another desperate attempt to score some cheap political points - maybe wi
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That's the problem with the law. It's politicians being seen to be doing something without really doing anything.
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They are doing something about it: the law says blocking the site is possible. Just it's something for the future, not for this stage of the process.
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah... but they have to have committed the murder in the country in the first place.
And I'd say "Well, technically someone can make a request from Britain to get a webpage from America and receive content" shouldn't be enough to constitute actually interacting with that country, any more than me farting in an American Taco Bell should result in my being fined for polluting Canada, however close to the border I might be. It's not actually that easy to provide country specific access given IP ranges change all the time, and VPNs are a thing.
While I'm not remotely sympathetic with either of these asshole websites, I don't believe UK law should apply in this case. If the UK wants to block them, let them do it at the ISP level, or relay level in the case of Cloudflare. Fining them is absurd and just going to result in arguments about jurisdiction and ultimately nobody except lawyers seeing money, mostly from the UK government itself.
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"Well, technically someone can make a request from Britain to get a webpage from America and receive content" shouldn't be enough to constitute actually interacting with that country,
I think it is enough. "serving content" = "open for business". They don't charge the user, but that's not the question.
I would agree with you if it was a private communication between individuals, but it's a company that hosts a commercial forum. There are very clear parallels in the physical world (not all companies ship everywhere because complying with laws at destination is bothersome) and "but on the internet" isn't per se an argument.
any more than me farting in an American Taco Bell should result in my being fined for polluting Canada, however close to the border I might be.
You are certainly right that it's WHERE you are located when you "fa
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Websites don't "push" stuff to you unless you've requested they do so. Therefore, 4chan is being visited by people in the UK. It's not like 4chan is just magically popping up in peoples' browsers.
If the UK doesn't like the website, they can block it. Expecting a foreign website to bow down to your local government is a joke. No one is forced to go to 4chan. They choose to.
Re:The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Informative)
It's not like 4chan is just magically popping up in peoples' browsers.
Indeed. But by serving actual content to $country IP addresses, 4chan is doing business with $country, and must apply $country law to those interactions. I'm not making that up, this is HOW IT WORKS (at least $country=UK and $EU), and whether people here don't like it and downvote me doesn't change a thing about the facts of this world.
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Wow i can tell you're highly educated on this subject by your use of BASIC strings in conversation,
Thanks for telling us how the world works and what's possible.
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That's not how it works at all. If you want to serve up content to the UK from somewhere else, fill your boots. There's nothing the UK government can do about it (other than ask ISPs to block your domain, perhaps).
What 4chan and others do is get UK companies to spend some money running adverts on 4chan pages, targeted at UK viewers. The moment you do that, you're "doing business in the UK" and that business can absolutely be held to the laws of the UK (the same would be true if they were an online store, by
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But by serving actual content to $country IP addresses, 4chan is doing business with $country,
Bullshit. The citizen of that country is engaging 4chan. 4chan is NOT engaging the citizens of any country and is not being run out of any country other than one.
If 4chan accepted money from UK based sources, then the UK can grab that money directly from the people trying to give it to 4chan; but otherwise, OFCOM can go fuck themselves.
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(1) It isn't that easy to identify ${COUNTRY}'s IP addresses. There are plugins that sort of help, but the reality is that IP ranges change all the time, everything is reliant on databases that are far from perfect, and most GeoIP blocks can be circumvented anyway. The best you can do is theater - claim you're making your best effort by banning some IP ranges, knowing full well that's not going to actually do much.
(2) Again, I refer you to my analogy of farting in an American Taco Bell and being fined by Ca
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The fine is apparently because they won't provide the online equivalent of a building permit. I find myself ambivalent; the OSA is a bad piece of legislation and should be amended, but it's not unreasonable to expect fo
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The fine is apparently because they won't provide the online equivalent of a building permi
And that's the whole problem. 4chan is not demanding any sort of "building" right in the UK. It operates in the US and maintains a presence on the international Internet. The limit of the UK's jurisdiction is to block access to it within its own borders. It has no right to impose fines or take police actin outside those borders.
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"If they don't like it they're free to do as imgur did and make a token effort to block UK visitors."
Why should it be on them to make any effort, token or otherwise, to block UK visitors?
If I left my lawn mower in the front yard that doesn't mean the guy who stole it was in the right because I didn't make an effort to protect it from theft.
If they don't block their website and some schnook reads it who's not supposed to be there, that's on the schnook, not on the website.
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I hear what you're saying, but it's going to get very messy if multiple countries believes it has the right to "require a building permit" from every single website in certain categories on the Internet, which is why in general people frown on attempts to do so. And it's unenforceable unless the webmaster actually visits the country in question, so the UK shouldn't even be trying at this point.
> This is a red herring. OFCOM isn't trying to restrict 4chan in the United States. They can serve whatever they
Make the parents responsible (Score:5, Insightful)
If the entirety of the UK believes that the material is harmful, then throw parents in prison for a few decades for allowing their children to access harmful material. On then can the children be guided in the right direction under the guidance of a benevolent workhouse.
The UK has fallen (Score:1, Troll)
Maybe the US should colonize it.
No. Not really. But seriously, the people running that place are deeply evil. Arresting children for *reading* social media posts. Arresting people for quietly reading the Bible in public. Arresting people for defending themselves from gang violence. Forced digital ID? Draconian capital controls. Security cameras on every corner. Attempting to repeal Brexit against the will of the people.
On the other hand, they haven't started killing populist politicians en mass lik
Re:The UK has fallen (Score:4, Informative)
I'll take "Shit that didn't happen" for $2000, Alex.
"Arresting people for quietly reading the Bible in public."
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https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
Re: The UK has fallen (Score:4, Insightful)
No. She wasn't arrested for reading the Bible quietly in public. She wasn't even arrested for praying in public or even for protesting. She was arrested for intimidating women going into an abortion clinic in violation of a law banning people from doing that. Now you may think that her actions weren't intimidation, but law says otherwise. It specifically defines her actions as illegal intimidation. That she was praying whole doing it is irrelevant.
Re:The UK has fallen (Score:4, Insightful)
It does very well to show that the person wasn't arrested for "for quietly reading the Bible in public".
It also does very well to show your grasp of the English language.
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Unfortunately, it will not. According to the article, that guy was not quietly reading the bible in public.
Re: The UK has fallen (Score:2)
Yeah, ethnic intimidation is pretty shitty. The police probably shouldn't have arrested. It's a bit of a stretch to arrest him, but it's still shitbag behavior and shouldn't be tolerated, at least not by society in general. Of course, I'm Anti-Fa and think punching Nazis is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, regardless of their First Amendment rights to spew hate. Had I been there, he'd have gotten a bloody nose before the arrest, that's for sure.
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The original incarnation of Antifa was the German Communist Party's version of Hitler's SA. Despite what they claimed to be their reason for existing; they mostly spent their time assaulting and intimidating the center - teachers, unions, and the middle class generally. I see little difference in the modern incarnation.
There's nothing good about using violence to silence dissenting views.
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There's nothing good about using violence to silence dissenting views.
What if failing to do so is likely to cause loss of life?
Re: The UK has fallen (Score:2)
Similar to all the people who love bananas so much they throw them on the field at football matches when black players are in the team. They also love monkeys so much they imitate them.
Just free speech, not harassment or intimidation at all, even when it's 200 people doing it.
How would you like for me to shout the constitution in your ear all day? I hear you like the constitution a lot, so it's just free speech. Or do you disagree with the constitution?
Free speech absolutists are hypocrits in general, idiot
Funny! "flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom" (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
Good they left the EU. Now you can see the white of their teeth.
More serious issues with Ofcom. (Score:3)
For a start they failed to prosecute broadcasters who fail to observe purdah during elections including the BBC, thus proving its motivation is in perserving the status quo.
Ofcom generally fails to prosecute news broadcasters that fail to observe impartiality rules.
BBC runs a program called "Question Time" which presents a false public narrative even stretching to hiring actors to pose as members of the public to support its falsehoods. It has never been prosecuted by Ofcom for doing this.
Ofcom failed to revoke Sky/BSkyB licences despite the News International phone-hacking scandal .
BBC / BBC Scotland broadcasts of Sturgeon’s coronavirus / Covid-19 daily briefings gave undue platform, breached impartiality or “platformed” SNP views without sufficient opposition response . Ofcom never prosecuted.
BBC misrepresented certain rulings or statements in relation to the International Court of Justice, and continued to do so even following corrections. Some complainants allege misleading framing. Ofcome never prosecuted.
Ofcom failed to investigate or sanction Panorama for its ‘Is Labour Antisemitic’ programme featuring distortions / zooming / face distorting of Corbyn”
In the BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, critics noted that the narrator was the son of a Hamas official and argued that this conflict of interest / relation should have been disclosed; further, that viewers were misled by omission. Ofcom stated it would investigate , but the investigation did not surface.
With regards to websites such as 4chan - there have been NO high-profile prosecutions of UK-registered sites - instead it pursues content originating abroad.
MailOnline a website full of clickbait / false headlines: dozens of press regulator (IPSO) rulings, Ofcom has not acted on its “harmful content” policy.
The Telegraph & Express online purveyed misinformation during elections & health crises resulting in numerous complaints on social media, but Ofcom once again failed to act.
Ofcom should get its own house in order before pursuing websites that are funded and run in other countries - regardless of its perceived crimes.
How does it feel if the shoe is on the other foot? (Score:2)
The USA claims jurisdiction over the entire Internet based on "the bits touched our server!"
How do you like the same argument applied to US companies? Not so much? Then maybe change a few of your "might makes right" laws like the patriot (lol) act.
Otherwise this is just the beginning of the end of free Internet.
"not responded to its request" (Score:2)
Ofcom says what? They responded with a lawsuit man. What other comedy material you got. "The man didn't disagree with me, he just punched me in the face for what I said."?
What are they going to do about it? (Score:1)
UK fines US company (Score:3)
There are 195 countries in the world (Score:2)
Never visited 4Chan, but this is the interesting question. There are 195 countries in the world. I set up in one of them, then serve information from servers in various of them.
Do I, on the UK precedent, have to ensure that every request is identified by which country its coming from? And then make sure I have a database with what the law is in each of the 195 countries? And then ban the content that is illegal in each country from being served in response to questions from that country?
Consider TV broa
Okthen (Score:2)
ignore (Score:2)
12,000 arrests per year for malicious posts (Score:2)
“The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms. The Times has the story.”
‘Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.’
“Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making ab
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BLOCK IT. Cowards... Its that Simple. YOU are the GOVERNMENT. You can just block it.
It also has to follow due process. Which is first a fine, then maybe later blocking if the fines are ineffective.
Anything else is just you trying to interfere in US Politics.
YOU are interfering with UK politics by telling their government what they should do. The UK isn't asking other governments anything. Issuing a fine to a private company (a totally negligible company) isn't politics.
(not that I agree with the law)
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Can you point at online discussions by politicians or comments by journalists that make the point that the reason for this fine is "US politics"? I'm not refusing your argument, I want to read about it in sources I could use to make myself an educated opinion.
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Take whatever the hell you are degenerating into, and keep it the hell over on that side of the pond.
Step outside and smell the ICEd coffee.
Re: Dear UK... (Score:2)
Re: Dear UK... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Dear UK... (Score:2)
They do business in the UK, which is what matters. If they don't want to comply with UK law, they can refuse to serve UK-based IP addresses and the UK will leave them alone - or if they don't leave them alone, everyone here will agree that the UK is overreaching. It's that easy.
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They do business in the UK, which is what matters.
You must have a different definition of "do business in the UK" than I do. Care you explain what business that entails? Is it simply existing on the internet?
If they don't want to comply with UK law, they can refuse to serve UK-based IP addresses ...
Why would it be their responsibility? Why isn't that, "then the UK can block them"?
if they don't leave them alone, everyone here will agree that the UK is overreaching.
Let's say I decide to do a swear jar at home, but for everything that plays on my TV (ex. someone drops an f-bomb on some youtube short, and I bill them $5). I start sending out bills to the content creators, and I threaten to jail them if they ever step foot in my house
Re: Dear UK... (Score:1)
You must have a different definition of "do business in the UK" than I do. Care you explain what business that entails? Is it simply existing on the internet?
They serve content and ads in the UK. The make money from ad views happening in the UK. The content viewed in the UK serves their goal, whatever that goal is, financial or otherwise.
Why would it be their responsibility? Why isn't that, "then the UK can block them"?
That would work too. So we have two solutions. Both are equally easy to enforce. I don't think one is morally superior to the other: 4chan is no less willfully serving their content to the UK than the UK is willfully letting its citizens access it. The difference is that the UK is a sovereign nation and gets to dictate what happ
Re: (Score:2)
We disagree on what defines doing business in the UK. The justifications you provided can easily be rewritten from the other perspective:
They serve content and ads from the US. They make money from ads served from the US. The content served from the US serves their goal, whatever that goal is, financial or otherwise.
Internationally commerce, maybe, but they're not doing business within the UK. It's a lot closer to someone selling a doodad that gets sold overseas as well.
Why would it be their responsibility? Why isn't that, "then the UK can block them"?
... The difference is that the UK is a sovereign nation and gets to dictate what happens in UK territory.
Right, which is why it's on them to e
Re: Dear UK... (Score:2)
I largely agree with you. My initial reply was to "(...) do not do business with UK" which I think was an intentional use of an irrelevant criterion with an intention to mislead; the relevant criterion for being subject to UK law is to be doing business *in* UK, not *with* UK.
The part where I largely agree with you: I don't think the UK should do that, they could block it instead.
The part where I believe we disagree: I think they are nonetheless justified to demand that people who serve content in the UK fo
Re: (Score:2)
Now my turn to stretch an analogy: imagine that someone lives in a nation where CSAM is not illegal and serves content to the USA where CSAM is illegal. Is the USA justified to demand that this person stops serving this content to the USA, or should they just block it? I am genuinely interested in your answer, I think most people would go for the former but some libertarians would go for the latter.
IMO, the USA would not be justified in demanding that person stops serving content to the USA. I could be mistaken, but I also think that's how they have acted most of the time.
"... or should they just block it?" This changed the question from justified in doing something to a question of should they (which is fine... just noting the subtle different). Personally, I don't think any blocks *should* be in place by the government. That content could be blocked by ISP's by choice, and/or home users directly, bu
Re: Dear UK... (Score:2)
Leaving Nazi content available in the US has led to the current shit show that the US is, that is a quick decent into authoritarianism. I don't think it's the only reason, I don't think it's the main reason, but I'm certain it has helped. Leaving the Nazis visible and available to the public has allowed one thing and that is for them to spread an amount of lies so vast and overwhelming that it cannot be addressed or "debated on the marketplace of ideas". I'm not saying that the solution is censorship, and I